Category: Brexit

Surely the prime sinister (sic) is meant to answer the question! The concerns of the sick, the old and our children’s education is not answered by calling Jeremy Corbyn a terrorist and wanting to buy more of president chump’s (sic) weapons.

A giant mural of Donald Trump locked in a kiss with former London mayor Boris Johnson in the style of a legendary Soviet-era image has been unveiled by a group campaigning for Britain to stay in the European Union.

Painted on the side of a building in Bristol, southwest England – home of the celebrated graffiti artist Banksy – the image reprises a 1979 photograph of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German President Erich Honecker kissing, which was later turned into a mural on the Berlin Wall.

It was commissioned by pro-EU campaign group “We are Europe” as what they call a warning of things to come if Britons vote to leave the 28-member bloc on June 23, as advocated by both Johnson and Trump, the presumptive Republican candidate in November’s U.S. presidential election.

Johnson is the “Out” campaign’s best-known leader and Trump has said Britain would be “better off without” the EU, which he has blamed for Europe’s migration crisis.

The 15-foot (4.5 meter) mural is accompanied by the slogan “Not #IN for this?” and a plea for people, especially the young, to register to vote by a June 7 deadline.

“People need to look at this image and think – is this the future I want,” said Harriet Kingaby, a spokesperson from We Are Europe.

Galvanizing the youth vote is a key issue for the “In” camp. Surveys show young people are far more likely to be in favor of remaining in the EU but also much less likely to bother to vote.

A survey of 2,000 students this month found that 63 percent did not know the exact date of the referendum, while 54 percent were not aware it was being held in June.

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IDS Calls Osborne Pinocchio Over Brexit Claim

Iain Duncan Smith has likened his former Cabinet colleague George Osborne to Pinocchio for claims that house prices will slump if the UK leaves the EU.

A Treasury report on the short-term impact of a Brexit, due for publication next week, predicts people’s homes would lose between 10% and 18% of their value by 2018.

But the ex-Work and Pensions Secretary, who is campaigning for the UK to leave the EU, said forecasts by the Treasury have often been wrong.

He said: “When I heard that, I did think of Pinocchio and the nose growing rather long.

“Let me just remind everybody that it was the Treasury and George Osborne who said, when we came into power in 2010, ‘we couldn’t trust Treasury reports because they were always fiddled with by Chancellors of the Exchequer’.

“So, we gave that over to the OBR, that is independent, because we couldn’t trust Treasury reports.

“Now (NYSE: DNOW – news) what we have had is a whole series of Treasury reports telling us the world is going to end, we are going to end up with lower house prices, the economy is going to be bad.”

An average home in the UK costs £292,000 and this is currently forecast to rise by 9.4% over the next two years, says the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

But Mr Osborne said that, if the UK voted to leave the EU on 23 June, the effect on house prices would be the equivalent of a loss of £32,000 to £57,500 by the middle of 2018. The loss for more expensive homes would be even higher, he said.

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Speaking during a meeting of G7 finance ministers in Japan, the Chancellor said mortgages would also become more expensive and first-time buyers would find it more difficult to get a home loan if the UK was not in the EU.

The Group of Seven finance ministers and central bank governors also issued a joint warning of the risks from a “shock” to the world economy if Britain votes to leave the European Union next month.

Mr Osborne told the BBC: “People will not know what the future looks like and, in the long term, the country and the people in the country are going to be poorer.

“That affects the value of people’s homes and the Treasury analysis shows that there would be a hit to the value of people’s homes by at least 10% and up to 18%.

“And at the same time first-time buyers are hit because mortgage rates go up, and mortgages become more difficult to get. So it’s a lose-lose situation.

In April, he said that leaving the EU will cause the UK’s economy to shrink by 6% by 2030.

Mr Osborne described the analysis provided by Treasury civil servants as “independent” and said it was backed up by “a whole range of external views (Other OTC: UBGXF – news) “.

Paris officials have said negotiations between the US and EU are “likely to stop” amid significant disagreements between the two sides over the free-trade agreement.

President Hollande has said he will “never accept” the deal in its current guise because of the rules it enforces on France and the rest of Europe – particularly in relation to farming and culture – claiming they are too friendly to US business.

“We will never accept questioning essential principles for our agriculture, our culture and for the reciprocity of access to public [procurement] markets,” Hollande is reported as saying at a meeting of left-wing politicians in Paris. “At this stage [of the talks] France says ‘No.’”

The French foreign trade minister, Matthias Fekl, said it is likely that the deal is going to break down and talks be suspended. Mr Fekl had already said that France would bring a halt to the talks if no progress was achieved before September – but he has now said that is the most likely option.

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Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: This sharp telescopic field of view holds two bright galaxies. Barred spiral NGC 5101 (top right) and nearly edge-on system NGC 5078 are separated on the sky by about 0.5 degrees or about the apparent width of a full moon. Found within the boundaries of the serpentine constellation Hydra, both are estimated to be around 90 million light-years away and similar in size to our own large Milky Way galaxy. In fact, if they both lie at the same distance their projected separation would be only 800,000 light-years or so. That's easily less than half the distance between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. NGC 5078 is interacting with a smaller companion galaxy, cataloged as IC 879, seen just left of the larger galaxy's bright core. Even more distant background galaxies are scattered around the colorful field. Some are even visible right through the face-on disk of NGC 5101. But the prominent spiky stars are in the foreground, well within our own Milky Way.